OpenID announces powerhouse board: MSFT, GOOG, IBM, others

Founded only in the summer of 2007, the OpenID Foundation is quickly gaining …

The OpenID
Foundationannounced
late last week that a handful of technology superpowers have joined the OpenID
Foundation's board, a sure sign that OpenID is going places. The announcement
was made last Thursday, but it's important enough to highlight now, even if
we're late getting to the news.

Joining the board of directors are Microsoft, Google, IBM, VeriSign, and Yahoo. While Yahoo has already thrown its weight behind OpenID, Ash Patel, executive vice president of platforms and infrastructure, said that the company was eager to continue working on making OpenID simpler for end users. Yahoo isn't out to just grab headlines.

OpenID, for those not familiar, is a movement aimed at establishing a safe, secure, and standards-based single sign-on framework for use across the Internet. The premise is that we'd all be much happier if we had one set of credentials we'd use to log into our favorite sites, as opposed to one set of credentials per site/company. Previous attempts like Microsoft's Passport have failed because they are closed-solutions with proprietary implementations. OpenID touts itself as the neutral, independent solution. Consider the telltale comments of Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, who invented OpenID while at SixApart in 2005:

"Nobody should own this. Nobody's planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there's no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we're all a part of the community." (Taken from here.)

Founded only in the summer of 2007, the OpenID Foundation is quickly gaining momentum in the form of support from major players. In the two years that the OpenID Foundation has been in existence, the number of sites supporting OpenID has grown from 500 to more than 10,000. That's impressive growth, but we all know that the power of a single sign-on service can't be realized until it is nearly ubiquitous.

Much work still to be done

According to the Foundation, Microsoft has contributed legal resources to the group, but the contributions of others were not explicitly identified. The focus at the Foundation for now is on marketing OpenID to the world, complete with the development of a worldwide trademark policy.

OpenID might have more pressing priorities, however. There is a growing perception that not all parties are really taking OpenID seriously. TechCrunch complains, for instance, that only Google has become a "relying party" that allows third-party OpenIDs to access (some) of its services. It's one thing to say "hey, we love OpenID," but it's quite another to actually support it and allow users access to your services through OpenID.

Yahoo, for instance, allows other OpenID sites to authenticate Yahoo users against the Yahoo user database. The reverse doesn't work, however. If you have an OpenID from another site, you cannot log in and use Yahoo services with that ID. And yet Yahoo is arguably the biggest supporter of OpenID in terms of raw users.

The fact that these players are all joining the OpenID Foundation's board is a sign of great things to come from OpenID. Expectations are high, however, and since this is truly a critical mass technology, all eyes will be looking towards the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo and Google to fully embrace OpenID.

Oh no!

Ken Fisher / Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation.